Gamification 102

So you’ve read what Gamification is all about. So why should you use it? What benefits does it provide?
Gamification is able to engage and motivate your audience into learning behaviours, with a balance of intrinsic and extrinsic rewards, to make learning and other activities more enjoyable.

Motivation is a real issue when it comes to learning and working. Students complain about boring lessons and workers complain about their work. Gamification is able to improve the situation by giving students and workers more reasons to love what they are doing. It shapes the target audience into designated behaviours by making the audience to perform certain task in a pre-designed sequence.

This enables Gamification to encourage behaviours which can be largely grouped into 4 categories: Collaboration, Competition, Exploration, Interaction. Each behaviour correspond to 1 of the 4 Bartle’s player types.

Collaboration

Encourage your target audience to work with one another, discuss ideas and collaborate to reach a common goal. These behaviours are encouraged and preferable in a big team where many members are working together. Collaboration will help the team to move faster towards their goals and help each of the team members grow and learn from one another.

Competition

Competition may have a negative connotation but it helps to increase the drive of individuals and promotes growth. Set targets for the target audience and get them to pit against one another for the first place. The competition will help to spur the target audience on and increase their motivation to perform the tasks required to gain more points. It also helps the target audience to focus on specific tasks that will help them gain points, making them more goal oriented.

Exploration

Give the target audience the choice to do what they want and let their exploration spur on their creativity. Learning and work can be boring, and this can be further worsened by having a linear and fixed sequence for the completion of tasks. Gamification’s flexibility in usage allows game makers to mould it according to their needs. The target audience can be given a range of choices of what they want to do now, and what they want to do next. This freedom of choice results in a sense of autonomy for the target audience which empowers them and at the same time further motivates them.

Interaction

Lastly, Gamification is able to help increase interaction opportunities between your target audience. Get the target audience to create interaction opportunities for themselves by giving them the incentives to do so. Give them a reward for organising or attending a company lunch or hosting a team retreat. Certain gamified tasks are able to increase interactions between the target audience easily and open up opportunities for future interaction as well.

The above is not an exhaustive list of what Gamification has to offer. Gamification is also able to motivate people to exercise, actively participate in classes, volunteering for a good cause and more. Using a combination of game elements and psychology, game makers can craft a tailored gamified solution to solve their problems. Add a bit of innovation and creativity to see your game achieve more than what you set it out to be.